Assessing Your Student's Progress in Yoga, Part 1

Yoga can result in dozens of benefits, some of which your students may not be expecting.

By Timothy McCall, M.D.

When I first came to yoga, I was incredibly stiff and had great difficulty doing most of the poses. When I first set the intention to commit to a daily practice, I envisioned that doing so would result in marked improvements in my asana skills. While I did make some progress, the results after one solid year of a 90-minute daily practice weren't even close to what I'd hoped for.

But what did happen was in many ways much better than I had imagined. The biggest difference was in equanimity. Little things didn't seem to get to me as much. If I couldn't find my keys or spilled a tray of ice cubes all over the floor, I wasn't getting bent out of shape as I once had. This made an enormous difference in my quality of life.

Students often come to yoga or yoga therapy looking for a specific result, such as being relieved of back pain or losing weight. But while yoga can often result in these outcomes, other factors could intervene to thwart progress, so that results can never be guaranteed. Rather than promising a specific outcome, yoga advises us to do the practice and see what happens. And most people discover, as I did, that even if what they wanted (or thought they wanted) doesn't happen, the practice is still worthwhile.

Yoga Is Strong but Slow Medicine

Even if you can't guarantee a specific result, it's absolutely appropriate to design a practice for your students that you hope will be effective for the health problems that bring them to you. What you are doing is trying to set up the conditions that allow healing to occur. But whether it happens or not—or how quickly it happens—depends on factors that may be beyond your or your students' ability to control.

In the modern I-need-it-now world, you are likely to encounter students who are impatient for results. They may be accustomed to visiting doctors who give them pills that start to work almost immediately. (Of course, one of the reasons patients come to yoga therapists is that drugs often don't provide lasting solutions, or they cause intolerable side effects.) Remind your students that yoga is a powerful modality, but that it works in a different manner than conventional medicine. Rather than simply treat a specific complaint, yoga seeks to improve, in a holistic manner, the functioning of various systems of the body: lowering stress, improving immunity, relaxing muscle tension, improving posture, boosting mood. Do all these things (and more) through a yoga practice, and the body is able to correct many problems on its own.

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